If you try installing Matlab 2007a on Fedora 7 like it says in the instructions, you'll get some error message like this when you run the installer:
libXp.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
This post will tell you how to get rid of that error and run the installer.

First, you need to install the xorg-x11-deprecated-libs package, which hasn't been distributed since FC4 as far as I can tell. The FC4 RPM works fine though; get it here: http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/2829969/com/xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-6.8.2-37.FC4.49.2.1.i386.rpm.html

After installing that RPM (either through the GUI or by typing "rpm -ihv xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-6.8.2-37.FC4.49.2.1.i386.rpm" as root), you need to put one of those libraries in the place Matlab looks for it. Run this as root:
ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/libXp.so.6 /usr/lib/libXp.so.6

After that, you can just follow the instructions included with Matlab and it should work fine.